Bidding websites

[Matthew Brown]

Dualkit,

Nope. It's a small world. In regards to your lack of feedback, we plan on addressing that by running quotes through the system and posting awards and feedback on where one's quote ended up relative to the lot. But that won't be available for a few months. None-the-less, I appreciate your feedback. This forum seems to have a strong and loyal following.

Matt

[Dualkit]

Originally Posted by Matthew Brown Dualkit, Nope. It's a small world. In regards to your lack of feedback, we plan on addressing that by running quotes through the system and posting awards and feedback on where one's quote ended up relative to the lot. But that won't be available for a few months. None-the-less, I appreciate your feedback. This forum seems to have a strong and loyal following. Matt

With out feedback a bidder doesn't know if the RFQ was even legitimate. You are in a segment of the industry that has been full of con men, so you will fight an uphill battle to prove you are honest. It still blows my mind with all the bad press out there MFG Quote signs up new members daily.

[Matthew Brown]

Dualkit,

Thanks again for the feedback. Mfgquote and First Index (out of business in Feb 2010) have done a pretty good job of poisoning the well. I've gone out of my way to position Qualified Vendor around their deficiencies. One one hand it's nice that they have made the market (product awareness), on the other hand they've destroyed their brand at the same time.

The key phrase in economic terms is extraction of consumer surplus. Since Mfgquote doesn't individually price RFQs (which we do) they are forced to sell more subscriptions to increase revenue. Unfortunately their RFQ volume doesn't increase with that, and they don't cap subscriptions. So you end up with 50-70 subscription holders each paying 5k/yr all quoting the same jobs.

I will raise the priority of feedback and full-transparency on my development schedule. I didn't go into this business to be Mfgquote part 2. I went into it to make quoting easier for engineers and to help suppliers get business more efficiently. Since you're my customer and you're telling me I need to fix my product, It'll be fixed.

Thanks

[Dualkit]

Matthew,

I actually thought of doing the same thing you are doing, but just to get work for myself and a group of fellow trusted small shops. My benefit would have been work for myself and a small fee to compensate me for the hours I spent to get others work. I always ran into snags and gave up. I wanted people to only pay for successful rfq's. If they never got paid for their work ( this has happened to me more than I want to admit) they should not pay anything. Also if a posted rfq led to a good relationship where the rfq requester went direct, my thought was the relationship would have never happened with out me, I should get a small cut out of the ongoing profits to the machine shop. Unfortunately all my good ideas to keep the people from bidding work from paying for nothing, required everyone to be honest and trustworthy. From my experience in this day and age honesty is rare. So all my ideas would not work in my eyes. My basic idea was to collect a group of qualified shops that have various skill sets, covering metal working from A-Z. I didn't want to have too many members doing the same thing. If an RFQ popped up for 1/2" diameter screw machine work, I didn't want 50 shops going after it. I wanted to get enough qualified shops together to attract a good salesman, the salesman gets his 5% when the RFQ is successful, the site owner gets his 1% at the same time. This pay for only successful RFQ system would be great, but requires 100% honesty from everyone, and in today's day and age, that is impossible. I didn't save your website, and when googling for you I thought you had went under. Good luck to you, but I think finding a good solution to this issue is almost impossible,...........Bob

[Matthew Brown]

Bob,

Thanks. No, we're still here. And yes, success fees are almost impossible to track. The problem with that model is that you have to create a double-blind system in a vein where back and fourth communication between buyer and suppliers is paramount. Moreover, most buyers will perform some form of due diligence (DnB reports or site surveys) before issuing a PO to a new supplier.

There are some businesses out there (Source Authority comes to mind) that operate in the method you described. They effectively act as an external purchasing department.

The end game for Qualified Vendor is going to be in RFQ Management solutions. As the suppliers want access to streams of RFQs, buyers want supplier discovery, but they feel more pain in information management. Although most have some form of ERP system, not many of they work well nor do they utilize the web properly for supplier management; note this mostly applies to companies <25M in revenue.

In a perfect world, as an engineer, a BOM would go into a system and a CBOM would come out. Five quotes, supplier rankings (akin to ebay rankings), sort by fastest lead times, best price & the two previous items coupled with best feedback. We're not there yet, but that's where we're headed. Mfgquote sort of does this but they are lacking in revision control, BOM structuring and they generate too many quotes - it's overwhelming for the buyer and discouraging for the supplier. But they are a company allegedly doing >25M in revenue. That revenue is largely supported by oversold subscriptions. So what is their real valuation? They'll always have some business, even with their high churn, but as more suppliers drop off the remaining will get more awards. So with their model there will always be an ebb and flow. It's just unfortunate that with their model a successful bottom line comes at the detriment of supplier confidence and ROI.

That said, there is no prefect model. We chose ours because we felt it is the best balance to the equation.

[travis11]

My company tried it for a number of months. It ended less than amicably. Their salespeople are very good. They went as far as "guaranteeing" that we would earn more work. Needless to say, we didn't and it was costing a lot and taking a lot of time to do.

I think there are companies it could work well for. If you have a very broad range of capabilities, and are comfortable competing on price alone, then it might work. We were too specialized, so there ended up being very few rfq's that even fit our company, even though they said that would not be a problem when selling us on it. For those rfq's we did quote, we either never had any feedback or closure on, or we were way out of the price range.

I would caution you be very realistic about it before signing any contract.

[Dualkit]

Originally Posted by travis11 My company tried it for a number of months. It ended less than amicably. Their salespeople are very good. They went as far as "guaranteeing" that we would earn more work. Needless to say, we didn't and it was costing a lot and taking a lot of time to do. I think there are companies it could work well for. If you have a very broad range of capabilities, and are comfortable competing on price alone, then it might work. We were too specialized, so there ended up being very few rfq's that even fit our company, even though they said that would not be a problem when selling us on it. For those rfq's we did quote, we either never had any feedback or closure on, or we were way out of the price range. I would caution you be very realistic about it before signing any contract.

With sales people you must always get their guarantee in writing and make them sign off on it. Unfortunately we don't live in the 1890's where a man's word was as good as gold. It is now accepted practice to lie and exaggerate to sell something, just watch any infomercial, and our government doesn't do much to shut the liars and thieves down. Now more than ever it is buyer beware and "if it sounds too good to be true" it most definitely is. What I don't understand is MFG quote still continues to find victims. We have a wonderful thing called the internet, people need to use it, just google MFG quote and you will get hundreds of people who were scammed by them. Why people keep wasting money on them blows my mind.